6 June 2013
On June 4, after
a week of protests that have seen hundreds of thousands of people pour into
Istanbul’s Taksim Square and take to the streets of Ankara, Izmir and some 65
other cities across the country, Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül assured
anxious businessmen that these events were not comparable to the revolutions
that erupted in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011.
Gül was
addressing a meeting of Turkey’s
International Investors Association just a day after Istanbul’s stock market fell by 10.5 percent
in response to the popular upheaval.
“Two years ago
in London, cars
were burned and shops were looted because of similar reasons,” said Gül. “During
revolts in Spain
due to the economic crisis, people filled the squares. The Occupy Wall Street
movement continued for months in the United States. What happens in Turkey is
similar to these countries.”
Such assurances
likely proved cold comfort to businessmen fearing that continuing social
protests threatened their investments.
Standing at the
crossroads of East and West, Turkey
has drawn into itself all of the explosive contradictions of both. It is
seeking membership in a European Union that is imposing mass austerity, while
simultaneously involving itself deeply in the US-backed sectarian war for
regime-change in Syria.
Serving as Washington’s point-man,
it was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who demanded that Assad
resign for repressing armed opponents. “A leader who kills his own people has
lost his legitimacy,” he declared. So far, Erdogan’s repressive forces have
killed three peaceful Turkish protesters, while injuring over 3,200 and
arresting over 3,300 more.
Like both
revolutions of 2011 and the events in the West cited by President Gül, the
Turkish revolt is deeply rooted in the structure of capitalist society and its
global crisis. This has been expressed above all in the unprecedented growth of
social inequality in Turkey
during more than a decade of rule by Prime Minister Erdogan and his Islamist
AKP (Justice and Development Party) government.
Nothing else can
explain how the repression of a handful of protesters attempting to stop the
bulldozing of Istanbul’s Gezi Park
to make way for the development of a shopping mall ignited such a powerful,
nationwide movement of protest, with hundreds of thousands prepared to confront
the brutality of Turkish riot police.
The park project
was itself emblematic of the Erdogan government’s aggressive and reactionary
market policies: privatizing public space to enrich a handful of crony
capitalists who constitute the AKP’s core political base, while seeking to
transform Istanbul
into a haven for the rich and privileged by driving the working class out. In
the bargain, Erdogan has promoted Islamist reaction, threatening to build a
mosque on the site of Taksim Square, the traditional rallying point of the
Turkish workers’ movement, and naming a bridge after a 16th century
Ottoman sultan infamous for his slaughter of Turkey’s Alevi minority.
It is the
Turkish working class that has borne the brunt of the AKP government’s attacks.
As elsewhere, capitalists in Turkey
seized upon the world financial crisis of 2008 as an opportunity to slash
payrolls and drive down labor costs. By early 2009, unemployment was up to 16
percent. Growth since then has been achieved largely without adding new jobs.
Instead, the threat of layoffs has been used to force those still working to
labor harder for lower wages and, in many cases, accept subcontracting of work
and casual labor.
According to a
study released in 2011, Turkey
had the second highest level of income inequality of all 34 Organization of
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, with figures only
slightly better than Mexico’s
and slightly worse than the third most unequal country, the United States.
Like their
counterparts in Greece and
the rest of Europe, Turkish workers have
confronted a brutal offensive by the international banks and corporations,
which see the country as a cheap-labor platform and a source of super profits.
While hundreds
of thousands of workers joined union-led strikes and demonstrations on June 5,
the working class as a whole has yet to move decisively into struggle. The
Turkish unions have done nothing until now to fight the Erdogan
government—instead endorsing its pro-capitalist measures in response to the
2008 crisis and joining it in sponsoring a campaign based on the slogan, “Go
shopping.”
The unions do
not want to see a decisive confrontation with this government. They are already
thoroughly integrated into the consultative bodies of the European Union, which
they support, and have gone along with the EU’s imposition of austerity
measures in neighboring Greece
and elsewhere.
A revolutionary
working class movement to topple the Erdogan government can emerge only
independently of and in rebellion against these unions.
The Turkish
events represent a deepening of the crisis of US imperialism and its militarist
campaign to dominate the oil-rich regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia,
in which Turkey, a NATO member, has served as a lynch pin.
Barely two weeks
before the eruption of the current movement, Erdogan was in Washington standing side-by-side with Obama,
who praised him for “being such a strong ally and partner in the region and
around the world.” Washington has promoted
Erdogan’s government as a model for the Middle East—its police state repression
of political opponents, journalists and ethnic minorities notwithstanding, a
supposedly “moderate Islamist” regime of the kind that the US has supported against the revolutionary
masses in Egypt and Tunisia. Now
the masses of people in Turkey
are rejecting this model.
Having used
Turkey as a forward base in its campaign to destabilize Syria and Iran,
Washington has succeeded in destabilizing Turkey itself, where the vast
majority of the population is hostile to the use of Al Qaeda-linked Islamist
militias as proxies in a war to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and
fear that similar forces will be unleashed against them as well.
Turkey stands at a crossroads. Turkish workers
coming into struggle are confronted with a stark choice. Will they be drawn
ever more directly into bloody sectarian-based wars promoted by imperialism in
pursuit of strategic and profit interests, wars that have the potential of
erupting into a global conflagration involving Iran, the US, Russia, China and
other powers?
Or will the
working class advance its own socialist solution through an independent
revolutionary struggle, drawing the masses of rural poor and oppressed behind
it, against imperialism and all sections of the Turkish bourgeoisie, both
Islamist and secularist?
The immediate
fate of the protest movement that has taken to the streets of Istanbul
and cities across Turkey
is uncertain. But the coming into struggle of the Turkish working class is a
question of world historic significance, with revolutionary implications for
the Middle East, Europe and beyond.
Bill Van Auken
